Season 07 Episode 04

The congregation at Grantchester is small and fond of gossip, and the women of the Missionary Circle are organising a charity auction for refugees, with Daniel Marlowe helping with the photography and the notices. They tell Will that Mrs Chapman has promised twelve cakes and has not delivered them. Bonnie Evans comes to see Will and sets the parish talking, helping him bake the cakes in Mrs Chapman's place; he burns them and wipes flour off her face. Mrs Chapman is working at Leonard's cafe rather than at the vicarage, and when Will challenges her she tells him she is on a hiatus because she has lost her faith. He takes Jim Baker, the student who wants to be a vicar, to meet Leonard, who says he misses the ministry every day, and Will brings Leonard's baba ghanoush to the auction in place of the cakes.

The auction is interrupted by a body. Neil Hughes, an electrician and the husband of Grace, one of the organisers, is found dead behind the curtain in the village hall. He did not come home the previous night, Grace says, but he often slept in his van when he worked late. There are scratches near the van's door handle and a hammer on the ground nearby, and inside the van Geordie finds indecent photographs of Kathleen Wilson, a widow involved with the auction. Kathleen admits to an affair with Neil and says she had not seen him since he took the photographs, and that after the other women left the hall she came back to recover them, found him dead, took his hammer and tried unsuccessfully to break into the van.

The hammer is not the murder weapon. Neil appears to have fallen from a ladder and struck his head, but there is blood and hair on the corner of his toolbox. He had been arrested recently for stealing a wallet at the cricket club, reported by Natalie Benoit, another member of Will's congregation, and the matter turned out to be a misunderstanding. She had been lodging with Neil and Grace and moved out afterwards. In Neil's locker at the club Geordie finds an envelope addressed to Neil containing jewellery, and back at the auction, which carries on despite the death, he compares the handwriting on the bids with the writing on the envelope and matches it to Eleanor Ingram, the exacting head of the auction. Daniel tells Will that given the number of frames on a roll of film, Neil probably had more photographs than the one found. Eleanor explains the jewellery: she gave it to Neil because he paid off the gambling debts of her entitled husband Adam. Her marriage is unhappy, and handing over her mother's jewellery to clear up her husband's mess has made it worse. Geordie concludes that Neil was blackmailing her, asking for sex in return for paying Adam's debt and then asking for more, and that she tried to buy him off with the jewellery.

Grace arrives at the police station and says she killed her husband. She knew what he was doing to Eleanor, knew about his other affairs, and had seen the photographs, which he took to show his friends. He was on a ladder fixing a light at the hall when she confronted him, and she hit him with something she cannot remember and felt happy for the first time in years. The confession cannot be true, because the ladder is too short to reach the light. Geordie and Will search for the rest of Neil's photographs and find them in the toolbox, and they are of Natalie Benoit. Natalie tells them Neil forced himself on her while she was lodging in his house, and that she tried to engineer his arrest at the cricket club to make him stop. Grace had watched Neil closely while Natalie lived with them and found her somewhere else to live once she understood what had happened. Neil approached Natalie at the hall while she was hanging bunting after everyone else had gone, and when he stroked her leg she hit him over the head with the toolbox and killed him, and Grace worked out what had happened and confessed out of guilt for failing to protect her.

Will, meanwhile, is left with the knowledge that he did not know his parishioners and did not protect them. He and Bonnie had spent the episode trying to repair Geordie and Cathy's marriage, arranging a dinner for the two of them and giving Cathy a necklace said to be from Geordie. Both walk out, and Will and Bonnie finish the wine on their own, kiss, and then argue when he tells her she will regret sleeping with him, and she accuses him of treating her as another widow to be vicared. The illness thread comes to the surface at last. Mrs Chapman tells Will that she is ill, and Leonard insists she tell Jack, which she does at the vicarage with Jack and their friends present. Jack is hurt that she told Leonard and not him, and says he wishes he had the cancer instead of her.

The case turns on a false confession that is wrong for a physical reason, since a woman cannot have struck a man from a ladder that does not reach the light, and the true confession comes from the woman who was attacked and said nothing, which is the same failure the episode charges Will with. The photographs do the work of two clues, first as the reason for Kathleen's silence and then as the evidence Neil had a second victim. The auction going on with a body behind the curtain is the best sustained joke the series has run, and the exacting woman with the clipboard turning out to be the one who paid in her mother's jewellery is the neatest piece of plotting in Series 7.